Despite how lucrative book deals can be, especially at the presidential level, John McCain’s wife Cindy has canceled her planned memoir. [Halperin] Official excuse from the campaign: The time requirement was “simply too great” and she wants to “spend her time campaigning for her husband.” Worth noting: Michelle Obama also killed any book deal plans, at least for now, even though publishers were throwing the sort zeros at her that Hillary Clinton is carrying around in debt.

Memorabilia dealer Mike Gilbert claims in his new tell-all book that O.J. Simpson confessed to killing Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman when the ex-footballer was high on the maryjane, sleeping pills, and booze. Gilbert is also taking credit for suggesting O.J. “bloat his hands” so the leather gloves wouldn’t fit, though it’s unclear whether he also intends to take credit from Johnny Cochrane for “If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit.”

The book, How I Helped O.J. Get Away With Murder: The Shocking Inside Story of Violence, Loyalty, Regret and Remorse, whose claims Simpson’s camp is refuting, is supposed to hit bookstores today. [AP]

So, let’s get this logic correct: When O.J. wants to write a fictional book confessing his sins, and profit from its sales, the publishing industry launches an uproar about padding the pockets of an alleged killer. But when one of O.J.’s ex-friends, who claims to have helped O.J. get away with murder, wants to do the same thing, major book retailers have no problem carrying it?

James Frey told Vanity Fair that he wasn’t going to do much press for his new book Bright Shiny Morning, which hits this week. Then he blogged on Amazon.com that he would be doing “some press.” So, that’s one new lie.

How about another?

Three weeks ago, Frey and his handler Lisa Kussell at PR firm BWR told ABC News Now, the broadcast network’s digital 24/7 news channel, that he would do a sit-down interview, scheduled for today. Now, Jossip hears, with just an hour before he’s supposed to shoot the live taped segment, he canceled. The excuse? “He doesn’t look good. […] He’s drenched and not shaven.”

So how about a phoner, then?

Nope, Kussel took that off the table too. Perhaps James doesn’t even have a face for radio?

Actually, that’s not true either. Frey will be doing a spot with ABC News Radio.

As part of promoting her book Audition, Barbara Walters, whose wrinkles you may count to find the age of the the TV biz, is throwing everyone under the bus. First it was ex-beau Sen. Edward Brooke, and now Star Jones, who tried reinventing herself as a skinny Court TV host and, well, found little success.

In her memoir, Walters claims Jones forced Walters and the crew to lie on the show about her gastric bypass surgery, which she’s only recently come clean about. So how does bitter Star Jones, who’s saying goodbye to maybe-gay husband Al Reynolds, feel about Barbara’s treatment?

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Is it fair to expect the press to snap up gossipy tidbits about your publishing house’s high-profile new book and then ask them to keep proper reviews under embargo? No!, says Galley Cat’s Emily Gould.

Barbara Walter’s memoir Audition, from Knopf, has been splashed all over this website and elsewhere for the revelation that she bedded a married Massachusetts senator (and a black one at that!). That news bite was revealed on Oprah by Walters herself as part of a publicity tour. But what about the rest of the book’s material? Knopf wanted today to be the first day any reviews would be published, since today is the official on-sale date. But the New York Times ran its review yesterday, flouting the request, which is essentially an invitation for a paper as influential as the Times to break the rules. Because it can.

James Frey stated, in Vanity Fair, that he “doesn’t plan to speak to the press again” regarding his new not-a-big-fat-lie of a book Bright Shiny Morning. But perhaps the little road tour isn’t enough to assuage publisher Harper that they’ll move enough copies to recoup the advance? Blogging on Amazon.com, Frey says, “I’ll be doing some press” while on the book tour. And also, synergy: Tour stops will feature live music from a “band in LA is called Black Tide, and they’re one of the best metal bands in the country, they played t[h]e main stage on OzzFest last summer.”

Why didn’t Barbara Walters published her very personal memoir Audition, of which Knopf is printing 625,000 copies, before now? Because that would’ve involved revealing she has a developmentally disabled older sister, her estrangement from her nightclub impresario father, her on-and-off-again relationship with her daughter, the details of three broken marriages, numerous other romantic relationships (including that one), and the fact that when she left Today, there were no going away parties of the kind Katie Couric saw.

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Educated white woman fight! Watch your loafers.

Today, Salon scribe Megan Hustad’s new piece, “You Are Not Your Bookcase,” argues that “fave lists” — a person’s “Heroes” on MySpace or “Favorite Books” on Facebook, for instance — are silly, juvenile forays into bullshit people need to abandon. To make her point, Hustad calls on the succincter, better Virginia Postrel, who says particular segments of society’s eagerness to compartmentalize themselves “has turned us into self-handicapping snobs: Since we’ve taken so much care to craft our own perfect list, we feel more entitled to shrug off anyone whose list doesn’t similarly impress.” It’s right on, but it’s also a slap in the face of a New York Times piece smug masturbators from Brooklyn to Manhattan slavered over a month ago.

Remember Rachel Donadio’s “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books“? If no, it was this sad, widely read essay about arrogant jerks who break up with people not because they are stupid, but because their books are, and it encapsulated in less than 5,000 words what’s wrong with this city (this industry, this country, our friends, etc). Among others, the article contained this irksome wonder:

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In Barbara Walters, we see a woman who refuses to imagine what the end of her career might look like. Which is why she felt perfectly comfortable hitting up Oprah, to plug her book Audition: A Memoir, to reveal she carried on an affair with Massachusetts’ married republican senator, Edward W. Brooke, in the 1970s, after meeting in a New York restaurant. She wouldn’t want to go out on this note, would she?

The affair ended when Washington Post gossip Maxine Cheshire started running items about the twosome; Walters says that’s when she ended the relationship, though that’s also when Brooke asked his wife for a divorce. But for the good of their careers, they stopped seeing each other.

“Ed Brooke was simply the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming, and impossible man,” writes Walters. “I was excited, fascinated, intrigued, and infatuated.”

Every reporter’s attempt to get comment from Brooke, who is now 88, have failed, which, uh, might suggest he has no interest in discussing his decades-old tryst. Kudos to Walters, then, for throwing him under the bus to move copies of the book.

In Barbara Walters’ new memoir Audition (yes, there are entire decades of her life she hasn’t covered yet), she relays some of her own horror stories after leaving the Today show. Perhaps a certain struggling CBS Evening News anchor can relate? When she headed to ABC to anchor the evening news, Walters encountered her own brand of backlash.

“The blood was so bad between us that Harry’s cronies on the crew took to using a stopwatch to note my airtime [so that Reasoner got his share]. Harry’s hostility soon began to show on the air. I remember reaching toward him at the end of one broadcast, in a friendly manner, just to touch him on the arm. He recoiled, physically recoiled, in front of millions of people. The media picked up on the bad chemistry.”

And Walters still knows a thing or two about bad chemistry.

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When Time.com contributor-of-something Ana Marie Cox told her husband, Congressional Quarterly editor Chris Lehmann, that she’d be reviewing the new book, Right Is Wrong, from Arianna Huffington – a regular on the same party circuit as Cox and with whom Cox had discussed potential contributing to the Huffington Post – “he asked if I thought that might have an impact on our friendship.”

And not whether it might impact Cox’s ability to write write an objective review of Arianna’s book for The Observer.

Oprah would do well to lavish herself in Tom Cruise publicity, since this month’s Vanity Fair paints a scathing picture of her. No longer is she the innocent victim of the James Frey scandal, but rather a punch puller, duping publisher Nan Talese and the author into appearing on her show to call them out on the falsified memoir.

As Talese herself argued last year, and the Evgenia Peretz’s VF article confirms, Talese originally agreed to appear on Oprah’s show to take part in a “Truth in America” panel; she’d deliver the publishing industry’s expertise. But when she and Frey arrived at the studio, the show’s focus was switched on them, and that they’d be discussing the Frey scandal. According to one source we spoke with, they were alerted to the change as they were walking on to the studio stage, with no advance notice.

Meanwhile, as Jossip relayed last week, Frey never pitched his publisher, Talese/Doubleday, as a memoirist.

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Tonight, at 7pm at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, “memoirist” Augusten Burroughs will read from his latest book, A Wolf at the Table, about his childhood relationship with his father, not-so-affectionately referred to not as “Dad,” but “Dead.”

It’s Burroughs’ first manuscript in five years. Perhaps he was waiting out the James Frey-fueled witchunt for authors who try to pass off fables as actual parts of their lives. Perhaps he wanted to lay low after settling the 2005 lawsuit filed by family members who claimed they were inaccurately portrayed. Why don’t you ask him tonight?

Or maybe you could check whether any of Wolf’s tales are true, like whether his father actually let little Auggie’s guinea pig starve to death, or whether Dead chased him through the forest like he was a werewolf. And did his father’s severe psoriasis actually bloody his shirts? Was Dead’s arthritis so bad he couldn’t play catch?

All entirely plausible scenarios. But now, we’re going to question every single one of them.

While Miley Cyrus commanded upwards of $1 million for her “life story” – girl is 15 – Eliot Spitzer’s tell-all is being shopped around for a easily $350,000. Fortune’s Peter Elkind, who also penned Enron fallout book The Smartest Guys in the Room, which sold 129,000 copies, is expected to have a deal wrapped up today. But what’s the market like for manuscripts about fallen governors? Gay American Jim McGreevey’s The Confession moved just 38,000 copies, and that fella wrote his own downfall.

For someone who should be scraping the bottom of the publishing barrel, author and news-article-re-poster James Frey certainly seems to have crawled his way to the top. Over Nan Talese’s body.

Not only has his “switch” to fiction – one rumor we continue to hear from publishing insiders is James always imagined himself a novelist, but publishers knew they could better market a memoir, so he, stupidly, made the jump – been nicely swept under the rug (with A Million Little Pieces continuing to move copies), but his new effort, Bright Shiny Morning, on bookshelves May 13, is being feted with a May 8 Sotheby’s party with a limited edition of the novel, in collaboration with photogs Terry Richardson and Richard Prince, to be released. He’ll then head off to Anaheim to speak at the American Library Association convention.

Having ditched Random House imprint Double Day, Frey is now at HarperColilns. Which might explain why today’s Page Six carries the flattering news; HarperCollins, like the Post, is owned by News Corp. That, and former MSNBC programming whiz Davidson Goldin, who is counseling Frey on all things media relations, appears to be damn good at his job.

This evening, Times reporter and numerically-inclined Jenny 8. Lee reads from The Fortune Cookie Chronicles at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. If you attend, could you please get her thoughts on the city’s best dim sum? For realz, we’re looking for a new spot. [NYM]

With the pope safely out of sight, Bush administration liaisons Laura and Jenna are free to hit the 92nd Street Y to promote Read All About It!, a picturebook for kids that comes on the heels of Ana’s Story, a non-fiction manuscript that was met with a collective thud by everyone except daytime TV. It’s all a part of Laura’s push for literacy, a cause that’s also been met with a collective thud. [92Y]

John Koblin’s argument that, thanks to the web breaking EVERY BIT OF NEWS EVER, the newsworthiness of many print media stories are total hoky, since reporters and editors are grasping at whispers of memes to turn out articles rife with speculation and a prayer for relevance.

Which just about describes today’s rumor that Katie Couric might be writing a tell-all memoir.

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The Harry Potter lawsuit currently making its way through New York courtroom testimony is nothing if not a tearfest. Author J.K. Rowling and film distributor Warner Bros. are suing publisher RDR, which wants to print Steven Jan Vander Ark’s encyclopedic Harry Potter Lexicon, a print companion to Ark’s website of the same name, which explains all those made up words from the bestseller. But the real story here is all the breaking down on the witness stand.

On Monday, it was Rowling’s turn … or almost: She “came to the edge of tears” and had to “regain her composure” during testimony. “It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand,” she told the court. “The closest I can come is to say to someone, ‘How do you feel about your child?’”

And yesterday?

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Daryn Kagan, the CNN anchor whose contract Jon Klein opted not to renew in 2006, has found success as an inspirational video blogger. But the host of DarynKagan.com, who released her first book, What’s Possible, this week (news peg!), encountered one of the many roadblocks boldface names do when they try to build a web identity: Somebody already owned her.

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